Me Too...

"If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote "Me too." as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem."

I received unwelcome male attention from the ages of 13 - 30+ (males including the husbands of my parents' friends when I was ages 13-17).

In my early 20's I was harassed at work by male bosses who thought I was too naive to fight back...they left me alone when I threatened to follow up with sexual harassment suits.

I dealt with countless inappropriate physical encounters. In my early 20's I volunteered for Women Against Violence Against Women and I was an advocate for women - I answered phone calls around the clock and I met women at the hospital who had just been physically assaulted. At that time Wavaw told us that 1 in 3 women had been assaulted/violated in some way (another stat said 1 in 4 women). My belief is that 1 in 2 women deal with this garbage.

If a room full of women were asked to raise their hands if they'd ever been: touched without consent, hit on and then yelled at because they weren't interested, had a boss be inappropriate, had co-workers be inappropriate, been taken advantage of in a moment of weakness, had a doctor be inappropriate, had a teacher be inappropriate, had a stupid teenage boyfriend cross their boundaries, been hooted or whistled at from a passing car or while walking to the bus stop, and the thing that I get told constantly by random men walking by - "You should smile. Where's that smile?" If the room full of women were asked this I guarantee that almost all of the women would raise their hands.

To those men who pass by me on the sidewalk and think that they have the right to comment on my lack of a smile - I'm deep in thought about my errands, my challenges and advocacy for my kids, quantum physics, metaphysics, the depths of the Universe....and my feeling is that these men can shut the hell up.

I'm not anti-men. This is a worldwide problem - people hurt each other - men aren't the only perpetrators. All people can stand up for each other and speak out, and until we're heard men should speak up when they witness inappropriate behavior.